Today, we'll discuss some tips to help create a lead scoring strategy that feels organic, easy to manage, and can help your sales team trace back a prospect's story leading up to MQL status.
Tip 1: Separate your direct MQL qualifiers into lists
Any criteria that directly qualifies someone for MQL status should go into a designated MQL list. This way, we can leverage workflows and emails to automate things like a contact's lifecycle stage changing to MQL, reps being notified that their lead just hit this status, and anything else you want to respond with to someone's new status in your database. By creating a process centered on clean data, efficient communication, and less work— you can't go wrong.
Below are some examples of criteria you'd bring out of your lead scoring model and into your list:
A lead scoring model shouldn't have anything worth an exorbitant amount of points for the purpose of directly qualifying. We'll be working with smaller ranges whose lower, middle, and upper limits allow for easy interpretation. A lot of folks will use 0-10, but even that may be too big. What does it mean for a contact to land on a score between 3-7? A scale of 1-5 may be more appropriate, since there's a clear line between not-so-good (1-2), okay (3), and great (4-5)!
Your lead scoring model should allow your contact to reach certain milestones no matter what combination of smaller actions they take, especially taking into account frequency or quantity of these actions. A contact that has opened 10 emails and visited your page 10 times should be prioritized just as much as a contact who has downloaded 2 whitepapers, if you find that the conversation is the same. Allowing your contacts to accumulate points based on iterations of the same action enables you to do this. If we take the example used in Tip 3 and create a range to measure our contacts' engagement by email clicks, the scale entry into our lead scoring model looks like this:
Replicate this example as many times as you want with other metrics. The beauty of this model is that you don't need that many metrics to tell a story. If we were to take above approach and create a second set of scores for page visits, and a third for awareness-stage conversions, we'd have more than enough to qualify leads with!
In our last tip's example, I mentioned using 2 other metrics for a total of 3 KPIs we're looking at to determine MQL status. If we run with that, considering each score set is worth a max of 15 points, we're looking at a maximum score of 45 for our scoring model.
Regardless of where we draw our MQL cutoff on that range, one thing is for sure: our contacts will be able to meet our MQL criteria by accumulating points on any mix of criteria. 6 clicked emails and 10 page visits may qualify one person. 1 conversion, 5 page visits, and 2 emails clicked may qualify another.
When we make the range we're working with the addition of all points, we're able to stay nimble and accurate with our scoring model while being able to easily interpret the milestones.
Although in our last tip I mentioned a maximum range, it's important to note that there's nowhere in the tool where this is enforced. However, using lists we can materialize our scoring range for things like lifecycle mapping and marketing segmentation.
In order to do this, we benefit from dividing our range into parts that represent what meeting a certain score means for the contact's status in the database. I'm a big fan of dividing lead score ranges into 3 parts: "Leads in need of nurturing," "Engaged Leads," and "Lead Score MQLs."
Using our example with a max range of 45, we'll set our "Leads in need of nurturing" cutoff at 10 points. Anything above that will belong in our "Engaged Leads" list from scores 11-35, and our "Lead Score MQL" list will contain contacts with scores 36-45. They'll look a little like this:
Labeling a contact as a new/nurturing leads lets us know, based on their low score, that we could stand to send a few more emails, offers, etc. For these contacts, consider adding them into a blog subscription list if you have an active blog, or something with some top of the funnel content offers, along with some purely educational material.
Labeling a contact as "engaged" means that they've reached a certain threshold of interacting with your content where it makes sense to start getting a bit more personal with offers, e.g. webinars, event invites, and more advanced conversion offers make sense for this contact.
These are only ideas of course, once you have your lead scoring model and the appropriate lists to reference, you'll be able to create all sorts of workflows, internal notifications, and nurturing processes.
I hope this post has helped you configure a successful lead scoring model you can depend on. As you're trying the strategy out, feel free to comment or email me with any successes, ideas for improvement, or questions!
Originally published Nov 26, 2018 8:00:00 AM, updated April 10 2020